CANR
WORK TITLE: CRISIS IN THE RED ZONE
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Preston, Richard McCann
BIRTHDATE: 8/5/1954
WEBSITE: http://richard-preston.net
CITY:
STATE: NJ
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 193
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born August 5, 1954, in Cambridge, MA; son of Jerome, Jr. and Dorothy Preston; married Michelle Parham (an editor), May 11, 1985; children: three.
EDUCATION:Pomona College, B.A. (summa cum laude), 1977; Princeton University, Ph.D., 1983.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, lecturer in English, 1983, staff writer, 1984-85; freelance writer, 1985—; Uriania, Inc., chief executive officer, 1986—.
AVOCATIONS:Whitewater canoeing, mountain biking, and wilderness backpacking.
AWARDS:Science-Writing Award in Physics and Astronomy by a Professional Writer, American Institute of Physics, 1988, for First Light; Eugene McDermott award in the Arts, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1992; Westinghouse award, American Association of Arts and Sciences, 1993; Champion of Prevention award from the Centers for Disease Control; Whitman Basso Award, Overseas Press Club of America, for The Hot Zone; National Magazine Award; an asteroid was named after him.
WRITINGS
Contributor to Harbrace College Handbook and Grolier Encyclopedia; contributor to periodicals, including New Yorker, Discover, National Geographic Traveler, Blair & Ketchum’s Country Journal, and Science Illustrated.
Books adapted for audio include The Hot Zone.
SIDELIGHTS
Author Richard Preston has written numerous articles and several book-length works of nonfiction that translate matters of broad scientific interest into interesting and understandable prose for the general reader. Among his books is his best-selling The Hot Zone, an engrossing account of the deadly Ebola virus. As a journalist Preston’s works are informed by a great deal of travel and research; as an advanced student of writing, his work is highly readable, concerning itself with attention-grabbing subjects and highly dramatic true-to-life scenarios. In addition to his science-based work on astronomy, First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe, and his volume on microbiology, The Hot Zone, he has authored a book on the steel manufacturing business, approaching his subject from a technological as well as human point of view. Preston has also penned a novel about bioterrorism, The Cobra Event, which he followed up with a nonfiction volume on the same subject, The Demon in the Freezer: A True Story.
After spending part of his childhood in Africa, Preston graduated from high school in Wellesley, Massachusetts, “with a highly visible academic record, which included spotty grades and two assaults on teachers,” he once admitted to CA. “One of my favorite teachers (not assaulted) was Wilbury A. Crockett, an English teacher who taught Sylvia Plath when she attended Wellesley High School. Crockett is mentioned in Plath’s autobiography The Bell Jar as the man who tried to help her regain her speech by playing Scrabble with her when she was in a mental hospital.”
After high school graduation, Preston worked for part of the year doing odd jobs. The experience, which was far less glamorous than the young man had imagined, instilled in him the importance of going to college. “My parents liked this idea,” he recalled, but even with parental support, getting into college was not as easy for Preston as it was for many of his Wellesley High classmates: “Possibly because of my high school record, my applications for admission were rejected by every college I applied to, except Pomona College in Claremont, California.” Preston entered Pomona in 1973 and worked toward a major in English, graduating summa cum laude four years later.
With his degree in hand, Preston immediately began working toward a doctorate in English at Princeton University. “In 1979 I happened to enroll in John McPhee’s Literature of Fact writing course,” the author explained. “This was a formative intellectual experience for me, as it has been for a number of writers and editors who first encountered the possibilities of nonfiction writing when they were students in McPhee’s class.” The following year he took a break from graduate school and tried his hand at freelance writing, living in a basement apartment on Boston’s Beacon Street, “where I wrote magazine articles on dynamite, antique thieves, and snowflakes, and I went completely broke.” After returning to Princeton, Preston wrote his dissertation. Called “The Fabric of Fact,” it focused on nineteenth-century U.S. nonfiction writing and included a discussion of the works of Samuel Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain), Henry David Thoreau, and Herman Melville.
“After receiving my doctorate in English, I concluded that I lacked the strength of character to become a professor of English,” Preston once told CA. “Jobs in that field were scarce, low paying, and, for younger scholars, often terribly exploitative; and so I took the easy way out and became a professional writer.” The young man joined the writing staff at Princeton University in 1984 but quit a year later to devote his time to writing a book on astronomy. “During 1985 and 1986, I poured my savings into numerous trips to the two-hundred-inch Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory in southern California. I spent many nights there with the astronomers, taking notes in freezing cold and darkness, surviving on coffee and Oreos. The result was the nonfiction book First Light. ”
First Light introduces the reader to the world of the late twentieth-century astronomer, who searches for such hard-to-imagine objects as quasars, the light of which began its trip to the earth millions of years ago. Preston portrays scientists and researchers as possessing human qualities rather than as unemotional, white-coated technicians, and his awe at the power of the Hale Telescope is diminished only by his awe of the universe. The award-winning First Light “beautifully depicts astronomers’ deepening understanding of Earth as the merest speck in time and space,” noted Howard P. Segal in the New York Times Book Review.
Preston followed his successful first work of nonfiction with American Steel: Hot Metal Men and the Resurrection of the Rust Belt, an examination of the midwestern steel industry. Focusing on a steel mill using experimental technology and established by Nucor Corp. in Crawford, Indiana, Preston follows Nucor’s history from a small mill to the ninth-largest steel company operating in the United States by the late 1980s. Taking a gamble, the company turned an Indiana cornfield into a steel manufacturing plant and started a resurgence in the country’s steel trade, which had been steadily losing ground to competition from Korea, Japan, and Germany. Including a history of steel manufacturing and descriptions of how steel mills are designed, Preston’s work is written in an engaging style that makes it seem almost like fiction: dramatic, suspenseful, and with a happy ending.
In addition to writing books, Preston has written many articles for periodicals, including Discover, Science Illustrated, and the New Yorker. It would be one of his articles for the latter publication that would inspire his third book, The Hot Zone. The book describes the deadly Ebola virus that killed hundreds of people in the rain forests of Zaire and Sudan in the mid-1970s before finding its way into the United States in 1989, carried by one hundred monkeys shipped from the Philippines and quarantined in Reston, Virginia. Killing off the monkeys within days by attacking and almost dissolving their intestinal systems, the virus’s spread was halted by the government’s deployment of Army troops to seal off the site from outsider access. Frank Ryan praised The Hot Zone in the New York Times Book Review as “a tightly written, page-turning thriller” that possesses “an energy and sparkle that sustain the narrative.” Preston “writes urgently and clearly,” noted Malcolm Gladwell in Washington Post Book World, “and if his prose is sometimes a little overheated it can be forgiven because the tale he tells is so utterly engrossing.” Malcolm Jones, Jr., praised the narrative quality of Preston’s “account of how the decimated rain forests have unleashed a wave of murderous diseases on their human invaders” and called the book a “top-drawer horror story” in his Newsweek review. The Hot Zone became a tremendous commercial success for its author and was responsible in part for transforming the Ebola virus from an obscure African malady into a well-known international killer.
Preston has climbed hundreds of trees and is one of only four people to have scaled the tallest tree in the world, a California redwood. In The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring, he shares his experiences in the canopies of tall forests, an adventure that began when he enrolled in a school that taught the necessary skills. “Mr. Preston’s elegant narrative avoids scientific jargon but reveals the passion that scientists have for the ecosystem of the redwood canopy,” wrote an Economist reviewer. Preston contacted scientists who were climbing to study life at the top, and many took him along on their expeditions. Preston took his family with him to explore the ancient Caledonian forests near Inverness, and he relates the stories of other climbers, including Marie Antoine, whose first climb as a four-year-old girl was a fifty-foot balsam fir growing by the family home in Canada. He describes her marriage to Steve Sillett, a legendary climber who began as a college student suffering from acrophobia, a fear of heights. On December 8, 2001, the bride wore lichen, and the couple hung from a rope suspended between two trees called the East and West Spires. Redwood twigs were formed into rings, and the minister was a geologist who stood on a branch. Preston also provides a profile of Michael Taylor, a forestry school dropout who sold knives out of a zebra-striped Volkswagen Rabbit and who discovered, at 379 and one-tenth feet, the world’s tallest tree, the redwood named Hyperion.
A Kirkus Review critic noted that Preston comments on the lives of the amateurs and scientists who study the ecology of rainforests, “with a strong emphasis on the sheer beauty of the forest canopy as seen up close. Enthralling.”
Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge of Science is a collection of six of Preston’s New Yorker articles, which he here updates and expands. One is about Lesch-Nyhan Syndrome, a disease that affects males, beginning in their early years, and leads to severe self- mutilation. Preston writes of the science of DNA and genetics entrepreneur J. Craig Venter in “The Human Kabbalah,” and in “The Mountains of Pi,” he tells of two brothers, Gregory and David Chudnovsky, “a single mathematician who happened to inhabit two bodies,” and who built the world’s most powerful computer in their New York apartment with mail-order parts. The Ukrainian brothers, who had been persecuted by the KGB, were aided in leaving the Soviet Union by Senator Henry Jackson and mathematician Ed Hewitt.
“Death in the Forest” studies the hemlock woolly adelgid, an Asian insect that is decimating trees and for which there is no known control. Preston accompanied an arborist who climbed the dead and dying trees in the Cataloochee forests of the southern Appalachians to study the infestation. Seven ancient tapestries that hang in the Cloisters in New York City are the subject of “Hunt of the Unicorn.” The “panic” of the book’s title is revealed in Preston’s introduction, where he tells of how he discovered an unzipped zipper in the biohazard suit he was wearing while in the lab where live Ebola viruses are kept.
School Library Journal contributor Will Marston wrote that Preston “has the eyes and language of a fine novelist, but he has the mind of a scientist.”
In 2019, Preston released Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come. In an interview with Andrew Liptak, contributor to the Verge website, Preston explained: “It’s the successor to The Hot Zone, and I tackle all these issues. The main protagonists are African scientists, doctors and nurses, and I detail their lives and their experiences.” Preston also discusses the virus’s origins and muses on what will become of Ebola in the future. A Kirkus Reviews critic noted that the book features a “richly detailed narrative” and described the volume as a whole as “an exhaustive and terrifying story of viral mayhem that will rivet readers.” Writing on her self-titled website, Susan Berry commented: “Preston’s account is a fascinating, if chilling, account of how linked this world and how societies and worlds can be destroyed by a microscopic invader.”
“The term ‘nonfiction’ is hardly an elegant description of the type of writing I do,” Preston once told CA, “but … in nonfiction, one can experiment with a literary form that is still relatively unmapped. One can also explore the human condition as deeply as in fiction. The nonfiction writer, in ancient times, was called a historian. Thucydides, a great early historian whom I admire, once wrote, ‘I have described nothing but what I saw myself, or learned from others of whom I made the most careful inquiry.’ I try to see through people’s faces into their minds, and listen through their words into their lives, and then I try to describe what I find there, which is usually beyond imagining.”
Preston tried his hand at the novel form with The Cobra Event. The story features a young medical doctor who works with a secret FBI team to thwart a bioterrorism event in New York City. After this scenario became more real with the anthrax attacks that followed the terrorist destruction of the New York Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Preston explored the issue of bioterrorism further through nonfiction. His The Demon in the Freezer examines the possibilities of what might have happened if the anthrax sent through the U.S. Postal Service had been laced with a genetically engineered smallpox virus, or what might happen if terrorists manage to release virulent smallpox strains in the future. Daniel Fierman, reviewing The Demon in the Freezer in Entertainment Weekly, assured readers that “Preston’s writing is as vivid as ever” and concluded that “what Preston has crafted here is another ripping real-life horror story.”
The Boat of Dreams: A Christmas Story is a children’s story set in Maine. The narrator, thirteen-year-old Will, and his younger sister, Lila, live with their widowed mother, Sarah, in a trailer. They have learned that William Foster, Sr., died in a rice paddy in Vietnam, leaving them only his lobster boat, which he had hoped young Will would someday man with him. Although several fisherman make offers on the boat that the senior Will named after his wife, Sarah refuses to sell it. Will and Lila spend much of their time alone while their mother tries to earn enough to support the family, and one day during the Christmas season they return to find Dexter Claus in their home, because, he says, “there is a need in this place.” The visitor takes the children on the lobster boat, which is transformed into a sleigh, and on their journey he encourages them to live their dreams. Preston wrote this story of hope for a high school friend who was battling breast cancer.
Bookreporter.com reviewer Roberta O’Hara wrote that “Preston is nothing if not a brilliant storyteller, and The Boat of Dreams has all the best elements of a classic holiday story, including humor aimed at children (and the child in all of us).”
Micro, a novel begun by Michael Crichton and passed on to Preston to finish after Crichton’s death, follows a group of science students. Preston recounted the book’s plot in an interview with Audie Cornish, host of the Weekend Edition Sunday radio program, an excerpt of which appeared on the National Public Radio website. He stated: “These students end up in Hawaii with this technology firm run by a guy who turns out to be a total sociopath. And he has a giant machine that will shrink objects down to a fraction of their former size, including living organisms, including humans. So, these seven students get shrunk down to about half-an-inch tall. They become micro-humans. And then they end up abandoned in the rainforest of Oahu and they have to somehow find their way home. It’s a story that has a kind of an odyssey quality to it.”
Writing on the London Telegraph website, Mark Sanderson called the book “a ripping yarn somewhat at odds with the seriousness of the message. The laborious research into nanotechnology and the dangers therein is merely grafted on to what is essentially a retread of Crichton’s The Lost World.” However, Alan Cheuse, contributor to the All Things Considered radio program, described Micro as “yet another terrifically entertaining Crichton thriller, thanks to Richard Preston, and we’re lucky to have it.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Backpacker, June, 2007, Jonathan Dorn, review of The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring, p. 15.
Booklist, February 15, 2007, Donna Seaman, review of The Wild Trees, p. 4; May 15, 2008, Gilbert Taylor, review of Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge of Science, p. 13.
Christian Science Monitor, April 24, 2007, Larry Sears, review of The Wild Trees.
Discover, April, 2007, review of The Wild Trees, p. 69.
Economist, April 14, 2007, review of The Wild Trees, p. 96.
Entertainment Weekly, October 11, 2002, Daniel Fierman, review of The Demon in the Freezer: A True Story, p. 74; April 13, 2007, Wook Kim, review of The Wild Trees, p. 78; May 30, 2008, Jennifer Reese, review of Panic in Level 4, p. 93.
Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 2002, review of The Demon in the Freezer, p. 1451; February 1, 2007, review of The Wild Trees, p. 116; April 15, 2008, review of Panic in Level 4; June 15, 2019, review of Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come.
Library Journal, February 15, 2007, Margaret Henderson, review of The Wild Trees, p. 146.
Natural History, May, 2007, Laurence A. Marschall, review of The Wild Trees, p. 52.
Newsweek, September 19, 1994, Malcolm Jones, Jr., review of The Hot Zone, p. 64.
New York Times Book Review, May 15, 1988, Howard P. Segal, review of First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe, p. 27; October 30, 1994, Frank Ryan, review of The Hot Zone, p. 13; April 19, 2007, Janet Maslin, review of The Wild Trees; April 22, 2007, Kate Zernike, review of The Wild Trees.
Publishers Weekly, September 23, 2002, review of The Demon in the Freezer, p. 63; February 19, 2007, John Vaillant, review of The Wild Trees, p. 156; April 21, 2008, review of Panic in Level 4, p. 46; February 28, 2012, review of Micro, p. 81.
School Library Journal, October, 2008, Will Marston, review of Panic in Level 4, p. 179.
Science News, June 2, 2007, review of The Wild Trees, p. 351; August 2, 2008, Davide Castelvecchi, review of Panic in Level 4, p. 30.
Washington Post Book World, October 16, 1994, Malcolm Gladwell, review of The Hot Zone, pp. 4-5.
ONLINE
Blog Critics, http://blogcritics.org/ (June 12, 2008), Nik Dirga, review of The Wild Trees.
Bookreporter.com, http://www.bookreporter.com/ (January 10, 2009), Roberta O’Hara, review of The Boat of Dreams: A Christmas Story.
Denver Post Online, http://www.denverpost.com/ (June 1, 2008), Elaine Margolin, review of Panic in Level 4.
Houston Chronicle Online, http://www.chron.com/ (July 13, 2007), Grace Lichtenstein, review of The Wild Trees.
Independent Online (London, England), September 19, 2008, Christopher Hirst, review of The Wild Trees.
London Telegraph Online, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ (November 27, 2011), Mark Sanderson, review of Micro.
Richard Preston website, http://www.richardpreston.net (July 22, 2019).
Seattle Times Online, http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/ (January 9, 2009), Bob Simmons, review of Panic in Level 4.
Seattle Woman, http://www.seattlewomanmagazine.com/ (January 10, 2009), Lisa Albers, review of The Wild Trees.
Susan Berry website, https://readsusanberry.wordpress.com/ (June 8, 2019), Susan Berry, review of Crisis in the Red Zone.
TED website, https://www.ted.com/ (July 22, 2019), author profile.
Telegraph Online (London, England), http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ (September 18, 2007), Nicholas Roe, review of The Wild Trees.
United Talent website, https://www.unitedtalent.com/ (July 22, 2019), author profile.
USA Today Online, http://www.usatoday.com/ (June 16, 2008), Deirdre Donahue, interview.
Verge, https://www.theverge.com/ (May 27, 2019), Andrew Liptak, author interview.
Weekend Edition Sunday, National Public Radio website, https://www.npr.og/ (November 27, 2018), Audie Cornish, author interview.
Willamette Week Online, http://wweek.com/ (June 4, 2008), Kelly Clarke, interview.
ONLINE
All Things Considered (radio program), November 22, 2011, Alan Cheuse, review of Micro.
Richard Preston is a bestselling author of 10 books, nonfiction and fiction, whose works reveal hidden worlds of nature and wonder. His books have been published in more than 35 languages. Preston is a contributor to the The New Yorker, and all of his nonfiction books have first appeared as articles there.
His awards include the American Institute of Physics science-writing award and the National Magazine Award, and he’s the only non-physician ever to receive the Centers for Disease Control’s Champion of Prevention Award. An asteroid has been named for him. Asteroid 3792 Preston travels on a wild orbit near Mars, and could some day slam into the earth.
Richard Preston’s story:
I was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1954, and grew up in Wellesley, a suburb of Boston. As a child, I was shy, and loved books. My dream was to be a starship colonist heading for Alpha Centauri.
Books
At around age 9, I got into books. Books were an escape from shyness, and they opened doors leading into worlds richer and seemingly more filled with wonders than my suburban New England town.
In the afternoons I would ride my bike to the town library, where I delved into Mark Twain, Robert Heinlein, Madeleine L’Engle, Ernest Hemingway, Freddy the Pig, Arthur C. Clarke, haiku poetry by the Japanese poet Basho … and I explored science books, especially astronomy.
I’ve been fascinated with the natural universe ever since.
High School
Here’s my first driver’s license, age 16.
My friends and I did a lot of aimless driving around Boston in my beat-up Ford Falcon, occasionally picking up a hitchhiker and gloriously driving the person to wherever they wanted to go.
We went to rock concerts and protests, and listened to music on vinyl records. (I stayed away from drugs. LSD scared the daylights out of me.)
In high school, my record included indifferent grades and an assault on a teacher during a protest. I didn’t hurt the guy but I pushed him, and that’s an assault, for real. I was suspended for weeks, almost expelled, and got something like 25 after-school detentions. I richly deserved my punishment.
Despite the trouble, I had some outstanding teachers in high school. They included Jeanie Goddard, Gerry Murphy, and the late Dr. Wilbury A. Crockett, [link http://www.vqronline.org/essay/mr-crockett] the distinguished high school English teacher who inspired his student Sylvia Plath to write poetry.
College Application
I got rejected from every college I applied to. Afterward I sent an application to Pomona College. Pomona rejected me, saying my application was far too late.
After that I made a collect call to the dean of admissions at Pomona. (In a collect call, you’d ask the operator reverse the charges to the person you were calling—you’d make the person pay for your call. A collect call cost around $20 back then.)
So I called the Pomona dean of admissions collect. He accepted the charges. I said to him, “Do you have a policy where you change your mind?”
No, the dean said politely.
“What are the chances your policy could change?” I asked.
No chance the policy will chang, the dean answered.
After that I started calling the dean once a week, collect. It cost him twenty dollars each time I called, but he kept accepting the charges. “Hi dean,” I’d say. “Just checking to see if your policy has changed.” No, it had not changed.
After paying for about five collect calls, the dean told me that the college’s policy had been adjusted with regard to me—but not changed. In fact, the dean had put me on the college’s waiting list. Then they admitted me.
Catching Fire
I caught fire intellectually at Pomona College, majored in English, and graduated summa cum laude. Later, I ran into the dean of admissions and asked him why he let me into the college. “I just decided to take a chance on you,” he said. One lesson is that (polite) persistance can pay off, and the other lesson is that it never hurts to ask.
After college I went to graduate school at Princeton University, where I got a Ph.D. in English.
Writing Career
While studying for my doctorate at Princeton, I took a writing course taught by the author and New Yorker writer John McPhee. In McPhee’s course I became fascinated with the idea that nonfiction writing can be literature—nonfiction can be artistic, sophisticated writing, writing which is powerful enough to explore any and all aspects of human existence.
The novel, it seemed to me then, is like a cathedral. It was created by masters and took centuries to build. If you were to work on the cathedral of fiction today, you might be able to add some pieces of beautiful stained glass to a window, but you would probably not lay the foundations and build the arches and towers.
Nonfiction narrative, on the other hand, was something that seemed underexplored as an artistic form. It was terra incognita for a writer who was interested in developing different ways of telling a story.
My first book was a narrative nonfiction book about astronomy First Light, published in 1987. It is still in print and is considered a sort of cult classic about science.
Today
Today I live in New Jersey, not far from New York City, on a place where I climb trees with my children, for fun. I do my writing in a small office at our place, and enjoy life with my wife, Michelle Parham Preston, who is working on a book that I think will fascinate readers when it’s published. We have three children, all of whom are currently involved in writing and publishing.
Richard Preston
(b.1954)
Brother of Douglas Preston
Richard Preston, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts is a New Yorker writer and bestselling author best-known for his alarming books about infectious disease epidemics and bioterrorism, although he has written other non-fiction works. Whether journalistic or fictional, his writings are based on thorough background research and extensive interviews.
Preston's personal hobby of recreational tree climbing is introduced in his book (2007) The Wild Trees. This climbing experience helped him write about the largest known redwoods like Lost Monarch in the Grove of Titans, or Iluvatar, described in that book along with delicate forest canopy ecosystems.
Genres: Thriller
New Books
July 2019
(hardback)
Crisis in the Red Zone
Novels
The Cobra Event (1997)
Micro (2011) (with Michael Crichton)
Non fiction
First Light (1987)
American Steel (1991)
The Hot Zone (1994)
The Demon in the Freezer (2002)
Cree Narrative (2002)
The Wild Trees (2007)
Panic in Level 4 (2008)
Crisis in the Red Zone (2019)
Richard Preston
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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For other people with the same name, see Richard Preston (disambiguation).
Richard Preston
Born
Richard Preston
August 5, 1954 (age 64)
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Alma mater
Pomona College
Occupation
Non-fiction writer, journalist
Years active
1992–present
Notable work
The Hot Zone (1994)
The Cobra Event (1998)
The Demon in the Freezer (2002)
Richard Preston (born August 5, 1954) is a writer for The New Yorker and bestselling author who has written books about infectious disease, bioterrorism, redwoods and other subjects, as well as fiction. Whether journalistic or fictional, his writings are based on extensive background research and interviews.
Contents
1
Biography
2
Bibliography
2.1
Books
2.1.1
Fiction
2.1.2
Non-fiction
2.2
Articles
3
References
4
External links
Biography[edit]
Preston was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He graduated Wellesley High School in Massachusetts in 1972 and attended Pomona College in Claremont, California. He earned a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University in 1983.
His 1992 New Yorker article "Crisis in the Hot Zone" was expanded into his breakout book, The Hot Zone (1994). It is classified as a "non-fiction thriller" about the Ebola virus. He came to know the virus through such contacts as U.S. Army researchers Drs. C.J. Peters and Nancy Jaax. His fascination began during a visit to Africa where he was an eyewitness to epidemics. The book served as the (very loose) basis of the Hollywood movie Outbreak (1995) about military machinations surrounding a fictional "Motaba virus".
Preston's novel The Cobra Event (1998), about a terrorism release of a fictional virus combining various qualities of different diseases upon New York City, alarmed even then-President Bill Clinton who, shortly after reading it, instigated a review of bio-terror threats to the U.S.[1] The book strove to tell a fast-paced thriller narrative within the bounds of well-researched bio-terrorism possibility, and was reportedly pressed upon Clinton by a molecular biologist when he was attending a Renaissance Weekend event.[2]
The Demon in the Freezer (2002) covers the story of the eradication of smallpox, perhaps the most destructive virus to have plagued mankind. It details the survival of the virus in research labs and bio-weapon programs of Russia and other nations, despite its eradication in the human population. The narrative continues with anthrax, a bacterial disease of cattle and humans, used in the 2001 anthrax attacks.
First Light and American Steel are non-fiction books addressing astrophysics and the steel industry. First Light centers around the history of the Hale telescope on Palomar Mountain, and the astronomers who work there. American Steel chronicles the history of the Nucor steel company, and focuses on its newest steel plant in Indiana, whose success depends on a new steel-sheet making machine engineered in West Germany.
Preston's personal hobby of recreational tree climbing is introduced in The Wild Trees (2007).[3] His climbing experience likely led him to write about the largest known redwoods like Lost Monarch in the Grove of Titans, or Iluvatar, described in that book along with delicate forest canopy ecosystems.
Preston's Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge of Science is a collection of essays related to his experiences researching his previous books.
In November 2009, Preston was selected by Harper-Collins and the Michael Crichton estate to complete his unfinished novel Micro after Crichton's death in November 2008. The book was released on November 22, 2011. Approximately a third of Micro was completed by Crichton. Preston completed the book according to the author's remaining outline, notes, and research.[4]
In 2016, Preston served as the Bedell Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program[5] where he judged the prestigious Iowa Prize in Literary Nonfiction.
Preston resides in Hopewell, New Jersey with his wife, Michelle, and their two daughters and one son.[6] He is also the brother of best-selling author Douglas Preston.
Bibliography[edit]
This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.
Books[edit]
Fiction[edit]
1998: The Cobra Event. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-679-45714-3.
2003: The Boat of Dreams: A Christmas Story. illus. George Henry Jennings. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-7432-4592-X.
2011: Micro. HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-06-087302-8. Co-written with Michael Crichton; completed after Crichton's death.
Non-fiction[edit]
1987: First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. ISBN 9780871132000; OCLC 16004290
1991: American Steel: Hot Metal Men and the Resurrection of the Rust Belt. New York: Prentice Hall Press. ISBN 0-13-029604-X.
1994: The Hot Zone. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-679-43094-6.
2002: The Demon in the Freezer. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-375-50856-2.
2007: The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-1-4000-6489-2.
2008: Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge of Science. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-1-4000-6490-8.
Articles[edit]
Preston, Richard (December 3, 2012). "The Talk of the Town: Gone South: Flight of the Dragonflies". The New Yorker. 88 (38): 40, 42. Retrieved 2014-12-10.
Richard Preston is the bestselling author of The Hot Zone, The Demon in the Freezer, and the novel The Cobra Event. A writer for The New Yorker since 1985, Preston is the only nondoctor to have received the Centers for Disease Control's Champion of Prevention Award. He also holds an award from the American Institute of Physics. Preston lives outside of New York City.
QUOTED: "These students end up in Hawaii with this technology firm run by a guy who turns out to be a total sociopath. And he has a giant machine that will shrink objects down to a fraction of their former size, including living organisms, including humans. So, these seven students get shrunk down to about half-an-inch tall. They become micro-humans. And then they end up abandoned in the rainforest of Oahu and they have to somehow find their way home. It's a story that has a kind of an odyssey quality to it."
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< 'Micro' Picks Up Where Michael Crichton Left Off
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AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Audie Cornish. Three years ago, author and screenwriter Michael Crichton died of cancer, leaving behind a partially-written manuscript. When Crichton's family decided to publish that manuscript posthumously, they turned to fiction and science writer Richard Preston to help. Preston got the first part of the book that would be named "Micro" and a handful of Crichton's notebooks filled with handwritten scrawls.
RICHARD PRESTON: And then there were lists of things. For example, a list of the kinds of creatures that might be threatening - ants, birds, termites, question mark, and then he remarked: there are no termites in Hawaii.
CORNISH: Richard Preston spoke to us from studios in Princeton, New Jersey. The lists, he says, were a guideline for him to flesh out the story of a group of promising young science researchers who are lured into working for a mysterious technology firm.
PRESTON: These students end up in Hawaii with this technology firm run by a guy who turns out to be a total sociopath. And he has a giant machine that will shrink objects down to a fraction of their former size, including living organisms, including humans. So, these seven students get shrunk down to about half-an-inch tall. They become micro-humans. And then they end up abandoned in the rainforest of Oahu and they have to somehow find their way home. It's a story that has a kind of an odyssey quality to it. And what happens to them after they get into the rainforest is they begin encountering micro-monsters. And you can think of creatures the size of Tyrannosaurus Rex that are armored and equipped with shearing mandibles and chemical weapons. So, we're talking about pretty serious challenges here.
CORNISH: And, of course, these creatures you're describing are ants, birds, owls, all kinds of grubs. I mean, they're insects, basically.
PRESTON: Yes. And, to us, they seem somewhat harmless but Michael Crichton had this marvelous insight into the natural world, which is that we human beings are actually giants on the scale of size and nature. We are more akin to blue whales and redwood trees than we are to most forms of life on the planet, which are much, much smaller than we are. So, you know, I went around and I did a lot of research. Michael was scrupulous about is scientific research. And the species that appear in "Micro" are all the real thing, and I also took care to set them accurately in their ecosystem. So, for example, we have - I don't want to give too much away here - but we have an appearance of bats in the story. It's the Hawaiian Hoary bat. Now, to a micro-human, a Hoary bat is about the size of a Boeing 757 jet. And it's armed with a jaw, fangs that look eerily like those of a lion. And it also is equipped with ultrasonic sonar, which it uses to identify prey.
CORNISH: And all of this sounds - this is all as horrifying as it comes off in the book when you get to these scenes. It's scary.
PRESTON: Oh yeah. I mean, Michael Crichton, he dispatches a number of characters in this story in wonderfully Crichtonesque grizzly fashion, which is something I like to do in my own writing. When I was working on one of my books - I think it might have been "Demon in the Freezer" - that's about smallpox - and I was working with my editor, and at one point she put her hands on her head and said, oh, Richard, you're just a 14-year-old boy who likes to gross out the girls. I think Michael Crichton had something of that in him too.
CORNISH: One difference that I see sort of in reading the criticism of your work and Michael Crichton is that you're praised for humanizing scientists in your fiction and nonfiction. Critics of Crichton often said he did the opposite. And this book does follow the model of Crichton works, in that you have a kind of mad scientist figure.
PRESTON: Mad scientists are so great for drama about science. The thing about scientific disasters is that you have to be extremely intelligent to create a true scientific horror. I think that's what attracted Michael dramatically to the mad scientist scene. But also, I think our world shares a sense of skepticism and even fear of science, because science often brings us a double-edged sword. Let me put it this way: it seems to me that when a really true advance comes along, like biotechnology, for example, that biotechnology can be used as medicine to save human lives but these very same technologies can also be used for the creation of biological weapons to extinguish lives in a highly efficient way. So, essentially becomes a reflection of the dual nature of the human soul. And when science is misused in terrible ways, it's not the fault of nature, it's the fault of ourselves.
CORNISH: Do you think that is Crichton's legacy in a way when it comes to science writing - shining a light on that duality?
PRESTON: I think at heart Michael Crichton was an optimist, actually. I think he was absolutely in love with science and technology and he yearned, as I do, to explain its wonders to regular people. For "Micro," the real wonder is not the science itself but it's the spectacle of nature seen on a different scale. The beauty of the micro world is just it's incomparable.
CORNISH: Author Richard Preston co-wrote the new novel "Micro," out now. It's a book he recently completed for author Michael Crichton, who died in 2008 at age 66. Richard Preston joined us from studios in Princeton, New Jersey. Thank you so much for talking with me.
PRESTON: Thank you.
Richard Preston wrote The Hot Zone, a classic look at the Ebola virus and the scientists who fight it. His wide-ranging curiosity about science and people has led him to cover a dizzying list of topics, with a lapidary attention to detail and an ear for the human voice.
Why you should listen
Richard Preston is one of the only humans to have climbed Hyperion, a nearly 380-foot redwood tree that is the tallest living thing on Earth. Hyperion was discovered by explorer Michael Taylor while Preston was writing his latest full-length book, The Wild Trees.
His earlier book The Hot Zone sold millions of copies, spawned a movie, and made the Ebola virus horrifyingly familiar. The book is part of his Dark Biology trilogy, which includes the novel The Cobra Event and The Demon in the Freezer, a look at the bioterror implications of smallpox. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker. His latest book, Panic in Level Four, is a collection of reportage on a wonderful range of topics, from mathematical geniuses to trees to one of the most shocking medical conditions you can imagine. (This is the book that was passed around the TED offices with the note, "Don't read the final chapter while eating.")
What others say
“Richard Preston ... is a science writer with an uncommon gift for turning complex biology into riveting page-turners.” — Grace Lichtenstein, The Washington Post
QUOTED: "It’s the successor to The Hot Zone, and I tackle all these issues. The main protagonists are African scientists, doctors and nurses, and I detail their lives and their experiences."
Richard Preston on legacy of The Hot Zone and the future of Ebola outbreaks
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The National Geographic Channel has adapted the book for a six-part miniseries
By Andrew Liptak@AndrewLiptak May 27, 2019, 2:17pm EDT
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Image: National Geographic
Tonight, the National Geographic Channel will begin airing its six-part adaptation of Richard Preston’s book, The Hot Zone, which covered the first outbreaks of Ebola in Africa, and an outbreak in a Reston, Virginia laboratory in 1989 that required the US Army to clean up.
The book was an immediate and frightening hit with the public, bringing Ebola to the forefront of the public’s attention. National Geographic’s adaptation of the book comes a quarter-century after it was first published, and unfortunately it’s very timely. The virus has been back in the news in recent years: A massive outbreak in West Africa killed more than 10,000 people between 2013 and 2015, and another ongoing outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has killed more than a thousand people since it began last year.
We spoke with Preston about the legacy of The Hot Zone, what we’ve learned since then, and what we likely face in the future.
The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Image: Anchor Books
I’d like to start off with thinking back on The Hot Zone when it was originally published. Can you just walk me through a bit about where the book originally came from and what sparked your interest in Ebola in the first place?
The book originated when I was between articles in The New Yorker magazine and I was just hunting around for a topic for an article, not a book. I stumbled across the whole idea of these emerging viruses. These are wild, natural viruses that are coming out of the ecosystems of the Earth and invading human beings, and we have essentially zero immunity to them, so there is this potential for a massive pandemic that seems to come out of nowhere.
I start poking around and I heard about this outbreak of the Ebola virus in a group of monkeys near Washington DC, and that the Army had sent space-suited teams of soldiers in to deal with them. It was just an inherently dramatic story.
When the book was first published in 1994, what was the general public awareness of not just Ebola, but these infectious diseases? Do you think that was the dramatic nature of the viruses that made it a success, or that it was the aftermath of the 1980s and the AIDs epidemic?
I think two things were going on. First, there was the Stephen King-element — that it was it was filled with suspense. It was really horrifying and scary, and the descriptions of people dying of Ebola were vivid, and they hit home because the whole story makes you feel like “wow Ebola could wind up right here among us.”
The other thing was that there was a huge shift of consciousness happening in the scientific community about the nature of emerging viruses. There was a dawning realization that HIV was the tip of the iceberg. It wasn’t an isolated event at all. It was part of a pattern of emergences of unknown viruses extremely deadly to humans that we’re making what are called cross-species jumps out of wild creatures into the human species.
‘we represent is a vast, rapidly enlarging host that has zero immunity to these emerging viruses’
Our numbers have increased vastly over the past hundred and fifty years, what we represent is a vast, rapidly enlarging host that has zero immunity to these emerging viruses. We represent an incredible opportunity to a virus like Ebola.
That reminds me of a book by David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, which talks a lot about the transfer of these viruses from animal populations to humans.
That’s right, and the other interesting thing is that nature is highly reactive. Nature is simple, and it’s not just that we’re coming into contact with these reservoirs, but the reservoirs are coming into contact with us, and they’re changing and they’re reacting to the human presence.
Just to give you an example: in West Africa there is a hot agent called Lassa. It looks a whole lot like Ebola, except that it also invades the brain, and it cycles naturally in a certain species of rat. As the forests of West Africa have been cut down for agriculture, these rats have exploded in numbers and they’ve also increased their geographic range. The Lassa virus is living in a larger and larger rat population and it’s also now getting more and more opportunities to jump into humans.
The Hot Zone contains vivid descriptions of bleeding and vomiting bright red blood. I’ve seen some researchers complain that it planted an overly dramatic image of Ebola in the public’s eye. Have you had pushback from researchers in the field?
In his book, Quammen criticized The Hot Zone for exactly that: for laying on the gore blood too thick. I think that if I could do it all over again, there are certain sentences that I would tone down, particularly at the very beginning of the book with Charles Monet on the airplane, and I would be doing that just simply to make it more clinically accurate, because clinical accuracy always makes things more scary anyway.
‘If I could do it all over again, there are certain sentences that I would tone down’
One thing I think that was a little bit misinterpreted was that the major source of hemorrhage with Ebola is intestinal. During the first outbreak in 1976, people were projectile-vomiting, but the other massive source of bleeding where people really did bleed out was through the intestines, so the blood is black in color. I think I don’t think that I did a good job explaining that the blood that’s coming out of a person’s intestines is not bright red like paint — it’s just black and tarry, but there’s a lot of it.
So that’s part one. Part two of all this is that these use explosions of blood in The Hot Zone, led, I think they led people to the common idea that Ebola really isn’t that dangerous, because it’s too hot and too deadly, that it “burns itself out” when it gets into humans, and that it’s stable — it doesn’t evolve when it gets into people. The West African outbreak gave the lie to all those misperceptions.
Do you think there’s a racial component do this?
Yes. There was were accusations that that books like The Hot Zone — not just The Hot Zone, but others as well — portrayed Africans as being the victims and the white people were coming to Africa, and they were kind of taking charge and saving the Africans. That these viruses all come from Africa, and they’re a danger to the developed world. I don’t think those are valid criticisms of The Hot Zone or of other books like that. They may be valid criticisms of media, of film and television depictions.
Image: Penguin Random House
I’ve got a new book just about to come out, Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come. It’s the successor to The Hot Zone, and I tackle all these issues. The main protagonists are African scientists, doctors and nurses, and I detail their lives and their experiences.
So there was the outbreak in West Africa and the ongoing one in the Congo. Looking at these outbreaks, what have we learned that we didn’t know in 1994, when the book first came out? We have vaccines and treatment protocols, but it doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere.
That’s the paradox isn’t it? That we have a good good vaccine, but Ebola isn’t going away. We know a lot more about Ebola and viruses than we did in the 1990s. One thing that’s come along is something called deep sequencing; genome sequencing where we we go deep into the nature of the virus by genome sequencing the particles in detail in a large number. A virus like Ebola is not really a thing — it’s actually a swarm and the swarm of particles is vast in numbers. When 400 people are infected with Ebola, that’s a population or a swarm of particles that amounts to about 1 quintillion particles of Ebola.
‘A virus like Ebola is not really a thing — it’s actually a swarm and the swarm of particles is vast in numbers’
Each particle is an individual life-form that is doing its best to replicate and survive and it’s competing against all the others for survival in the environment of the human body, and when the particles replicate, they mutate. You could think of a school of fish, with many different kinds of fish in it. Some of the fish have sharper teeth and can swim faster in those fish eventually take over the school. This is what happened with Ebola in West Africa, and when you think about Ebola virus, you need to think of a cloud of vast cloud of particles that is moving through time and constantly changing.
So with that in mind, what lessons do we have before us that we have to keep in mind as we move forward?
I think we have learned lessons from the recent Ebola outbreaks including the one in Congo, and one of the lessons is that it really pays to do the research, and we now have what looks like at least one good antibody drug that seems to be effective against Ebola. We also have a vaccine which is definitely effective. It turns out that antibody drugs can be designed pretty quickly. While we don’t yet have any kind of surge capacity to produce large amounts of those drug for a new virus, we do have the technology to do it.
Ebola kind of woke everybody up to the possibility that somebody can show up at a hospital in Dallas with a Level 4 Virus, and as good as our medical system is, people were absolutely helpless. They had no idea what they were dealing with, whereas moderately well-trained African medical professionals would never have made the kinds of mistakes that the American medical system did.
It seems like that is borne out of experience. What occurs to me is that in a lot of ways, vaccines are just one tool in the toolbox: things like a functioning hospital system, education, and hygiene are just as important to solving a problem.
You just put your finger right on it. It’s the weakness of the medical system and the public health system and in many lesser-developed countries. Countries where they have real economic problems and just don’t have the resources that a country like the United States has. In my experience writing about this is that the African medical professionals were unbelievably professional in what they did. They were under-equipped with the tools and backup to really fight a level 4 virus, and they went in there and they fought it anyway with extraordinary acts of heroism and self-sacrifice, but they shouldn’t have had to do that. They should have had more backing from the developed world.
In order for the human species to protect itself, we have to recognize that that the health of an individual in West Africa is important for our health too, and that what West Africa or what the lesser-developed world needs is is a much better functioning medical system. A little bit of money goes a long way in an African healthcare setting, and the United States would do itself a big favor if it were to channel more resources into basically helping those African medical personnel create create better a medical infrastructure.
The other thing that’s just incredibly important is public health education. It’s as much of a problem in the United States as it is in eastern Congo. To give you an example: in eastern Congo, a lot of people believe that Ebola isn’t real, that it’s a plot by the government to do bad things to people. This exact same thing is happening in the United States with the measles vaccine: there are people who don’t believe in measles. They don’t believe in the seriousness of measles as a disease, and they don’t believe anything they’re told by the government about the effectiveness of measles vaccine. They are as much you know in a dreamland of unreality as African people who deny the existence of Ebola.
Richard Preston has written nine books, including The Hot Zone, The Demon in the Freezer, and The Wild Trees. His books have been translated into more than thirty languages, and most of them have first appeared as articles in The New Yorker. Preston has won numerous awards, including the American Institute of Physics Award and the National Magazine Award. He’s also the only person not a medical doctor ever to receive the Centers for Disease Control’s Champion of Prevention Award for public health. An asteroid is named “Preston” after him. (Asteroid Preston is a ball of rock three miles in diameter, traveling on a wild orbit near Mars.) Richard Preston lives outside New York City with his wife, Michelle. They have three children.
Richard Preston
Best-Selling Author of Micro & The Hot Zone
Whether delivering a grim account of what biological terrorism is capable of, sharing the inside story of how scientists are finding ways of protecting civilian populations, or revealing the dangerous and hauntingly beautiful lost world above the canopy, Preston shows audiences the world in a slightly different light than ever seen before.
BIO
Richard Preston’s critically and commercially acclaimed books have cemented his status as a first-rate investigative journalist and gifted storyteller, as well as put him in the forefront of the emerging diseases and biotechnology arenas. Preston first took the world by storm with The Hot Zone, the international best-seller that introduced the world to the threat of Ebola and other rain forest viruses. Spending 42 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, The Hot Zone inspired several fictional adaptations (including the hit film “Outbreak” starring Dustin Hoffman and Renee Russo) and has been translated into over 30 languages.
QUOTED: "richly detailed narrative"
"an exhaustive and terrifying story of viral mayhem that will rivet readers."
Preston, Richard: CRISIS IN THE RED ZONE
Kirkus Reviews. (June 15, 2019):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
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Preston, Richard CRISIS IN THE RED ZONE Random House (Adult Nonfiction) $28.00 7, 23 ISBN: 978-0-8129-9883-2
A sequel of sorts to the landmark bestseller The Hot Zone (1994), this time with a focus on the 2013-2014 Ebola outbreak in the forests of West Africa.
"Viruses are the undead of the living world, the zombies of deep time," writes New Yorker contributor Preston (Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge of Science, 2008, etc.). In this richly detailed narrative, he plunges readers into the "horrifying chaos" of overcrowded field-hospital wards in Sierra Leone, where "disoriented, infected patients" wander while scientists across the world scurry to identify a contagious disease for which there is no treatment or cure. First detected in 1976 near Zaire's Ebola River, where it jumped across species into humans, the virus returned with deadly force in the 2013 outbreak recounted here, infecting 30,000 villagers and killing 11,000. Moreover, it posed the nightmare threat of spreading into populous cities. Preston tells engrossing human stories of doctors and patients while providing a clear understanding of Ebola, from its genetic code and mutations to its terrible impacts on victims (fever, paralysis, diarrhea, etc.). In scene after scene, the author vividly re-creates the drama: Villagers throw rocks at epidemiologists during a burial, nearly killing them. A teenage herbalist eerily predicts the deaths of Ebola nurses. French and German scientists struggle to identify the virus. A doctor forgets himself and gets infected while trying to save a child. Cambridge scientists stare at mutations in the Ebola code and try to understand what they are seeing. Doctors are in short supply, nurses abandon hospitals, and villagers text message rumors about "white foreigners" in space suits experimenting on people. "Many didn't believe in this thing called Ebola," writes Preston, who also provides sharp portraits of virologists like Lisa Hensley, a longtime Ebola researcher at Maryland's Fort Detrick, and Sheik Umar Khan, declared a "national hero" for leading Sierra Leone's fight against Ebola, who contracted the disease himself, sparking debate over whether he should be given an untested experimental drug.
An exhaustive and terrifying story of viral mayhem that will rivet readers.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Preston, Richard: CRISIS IN THE RED ZONE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2019. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A588726952/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5d40d49a. Accessed 12 July 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A588726952
Micro
Publishers Weekly. 259.9 (Feb. 27, 2012): p81+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Micro Michael Crichton and Richard Preston, read by John Bedford Lloyd. Harper Audio, unabridged, 12 CDs, 14 hrs., $39.99 ISBN 978-0-06-087308-0
Unfinished at the time of his death and later completed by Preston, Crichton's last book receives serviceable narration from John Bedford Lloyd. Hawaii-based microtechnology company Nanigen has developed the ability to shrink objects--and people--and the megalomaniac head of the company, Vin Drake, sees the potential to make billions of dollars. But when one Of Drake's executives, Eric Jansen, threatens his boss's plans, he suddenly goes missing and is presumed dead. When Eric's brother, Peter, arrives--along with six fellow graduate students--and begins to ask questions, Drake shrinks them and leaves them to die in the Hawaiian rain forest. What follows is a nonstop fight for survival in the micro-world, where insects are as big as cars, bats the size of airplanes, and everything is hungry. Lloyd's performance is uneven but enjoyable. With his deep, well-modulated voice, he certainly narrates clearly and with good vocal intonation. But at times, he sounds unprepared and his performance flat. A HarperLuxe paperback. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Micro." Publishers Weekly, 27 Feb. 2012, p. 81+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A282425354/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6d383ded. Accessed 12 July 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A282425354
QUOTED: "yet another terrifically entertaining Crichton thriller, thanks to Richard Preston, and we're lucky to have it."
Book Review: 'Micro'
All Things Considered. 2011.
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The bestselling novelist Michael Crichton died three years ago this month, so imagine our surprise when a new book arrived with his name on it. Crichton left behind an unfinished techno-thriller called "Micro" and non-fiction writer Richard Preston took on the job of finishing it. Alan Cheuse has our review.
Crichton sets the novel on the island of Oahu, where money and power-mad science entrepreneur named Vin Drake has set up a company based on nanotechnology - that branch of technology that manipulates molecules in order to make tiny machines.
A team of young science students from Boston come to Hawaii to work for the company and almost immediately on arrival get caught up in a plot that involves murder and corporate greed. They get shrunk smaller than ants and then go on the lam in the island rain forest as Drake, the company head, tries to find them and stamp them out.
This is not entirely new territory for Michael Crichton or for contemporary culture. Crichton first played with nanotechnology in his 2002 novel "Prey." The wonderful novelist Richard Matheson, now in his 80s and fortunately still around and writing, did a nanothriller over five decades ago in his novel "The Shrinking Man." And who can forget watching the special effects in movies like "Fantastic Voyage" or "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids?"
But Crichton knows the science better and the insects and plants, the tropical spiders, moths, wasps and ants the students encounter on their desperate run to survive Çô and, needless to say, not many of them do - come to life, ironically, much larger than life and technically more accurately and vividly described than the menaces in most science fiction thrillers.
So to shrink this review to as few words as possible: yet another terrifically entertaining Crichton thriller, thanks to Richard Preston, and we're lucky to have it.
"Micro" is the new novel from the late Michael Crichton completed by Richard Preston. Alan Cheuse teaches writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Book Review: 'Micro'." All Things Considered, 22 Nov. 2011. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A290690391/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0bffd8cd. Accessed 12 July 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A290690391
QUOTED: "Preston’s account is a fascinating, if chilling, account of how linked this world and how societies and worlds can be destroyed by a microscopic invader."
Review of Crisis in the Red Zone by Richard Preston
June 8, 2019
By readsusanberry
What would you do if a loved one came down with Ebola? Do you remember when if you went to a doctor’s office they asked if you had traveled outside the U.S. within a certain time period and where?
That is what Richard Preston’s forthcoming book, Crisis in the Red Zone is about. It is the account of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and other countries in West Africa that started with one boy and then traveling through the Makong Triangle and spreading outwards until it reached Dallas, Texas and New York. Ebola killed thousands as it spread like wildfire until finally villagers began taking the fight to Ebola through implementing the Ancient Rule — understanding that Ebola is not a white man’s myth but a deadly wet virus that is spread through contact with bodily fluids, recognizing the symptoms of Ebola, isolating of and removal from contact with those infected with Ebola, and destruction through fire or protected burial of the deceased and everything that the deceased may have come in contact with. It is the story of giving (or protecting) life through temporarily changing practices, habits, and deeply ingrained customs and a way of life so that those who are not already infected with Ebola do not break with it and succumb.
Crisis in the Red Zone is also the story of the intersection of modern medicine and ways with ancient tribal medicine, folk healing, and culture and the clash between the two as seen in the struggle of Doctors of Without Borders in their “moon suits” to locate and then isolate and treat those infected with Ebola. To be clear, there were other similar conflicts elsewhere that rose to the level of near war between villagers and those who fought Ebola.
Preston’s account also delves into the conflict that developed between the World Health Organization, Doctors with Borders, and governmental agencies, in Africa and outward including the U.S. and how this clash led to the death of the doctor of the of the Kenema Government Hospital’s Ebola ward, Humarr Khan. It is the story of how adherence to inflexible practices and procedures can kill through ignorance of and the overriding local traditions that in turn creates conflict with local populations who have had limited contact with outsiders. This conflict and misunderstanding then creates myths and superstition in the minds of the villagers that eventually leads into war between the villagers and outsiders.
Crisis in the Red Zone also relates the superhuman efforts of Doctors Without Borders, World Health Organization doctors, outside experts and local medical personnel to struggle beyond the point of collapse and utter chaos to combat Ebola in situations that were war-like inside the treating areas.
Preston also details the evolution of Ebola vaccines and treatments, the Level 4 containment and care that is required to stop an outbreak through in essence creating a fire break in the path of the disease and the history of Ebola including the 1976 outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the lessons learned there which became known as the Ancient Rule and was ultimately implemented by the villagers and medical personnel in the 2014 outbreak.
This reader learned a lot through Preston’s cogent and in-depth writing and analysis that was easy to understand. At times, in the early part through mid-way, the writing had the annoying quality of like talking to a child. It was not enough to distract this reader. Also, at some point, Preston begins to write part of the time in the first person as he starts to relate to readers his investigation and research for the book. The first time a section appears this reader thought it was an error. It is not as later in the narrative, it becomes clear what the author is doing. Other than that, Preston’s account is a fascinating, if chilling, account of how linked this world and how societies and worlds can be destroyed by a microscopic invader.
Copy provided by the publisher via Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.
QUOTED: "a ripping yarn somewhat at odds with the seriousness of the message. The laborious research into nanotechnology and the dangers therein is merely grafted on to what is essentially a retread of Crichton's The Lost World."
Micro by Michael Crichton and Richard Preston: book review
Micro by Michael Crichton and Richard Preston (HarperCollins, £18.99, 429pp)
Author Michael Crichton Photo: AP
By Mark Sanderson, Fiction reviewer for Seven magazine
8:00AM GMT 27 Nov 2011
Fear – whether it be of rampaging dinosaurs, runaway computers or alien viruses – lies at the heart of Michael Crichton's work.
Aware that technology, once invented, can never be uninvented, he highlights the downside of things: every silver lining has a cloud. The natural world is full of shock and awe too.
"What is it about nature that is so terrifying to the modern mind?" asks Rick Hutter, a studly ethnobotanist in Micro. "Why is it so intolerable? Because nature is fundamentally indifferent. It's unforgiving, uninterested. If you live or die, succeed or fail, feel pleasure or pain, it doesn't care."
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The young scientist has a point. After all, he and six fellow graduate students have just found themselves shrunk to a height of half an inch.
That's enough to make anyone feel small. Vin Drake, the evil head of Nanigen, which makes bots – teensy-weensy toys for the big boys in Washington – has downsized them to stop them spreading the news that he has killed his vice-president who was having qualms about the Hellstorm, a toxin micro-missile no bigger than a moth.
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The mystery of the posthumous thriller 27 Nov 2011
And, as far as the plot goes, that's about it. The mini-munchkins including flirty entomologist Erika Moll, saintly toxicologist Peter Jansen and gutsy arachnologist Karen King (for whom Hutter has the hots) have to fight their way through the rainforest in a remote part of Hawaii.
They are pursued, of course, by a pair of goons sent by Vin Drake but the real threat comes from the flora and fauna which is lovingly described. A giant centipede, bigheaded soldier ants and carnivorous mynah birds are just some of the creatures that try – and occasionally succeed – in eating them.
Nature, concludes one of the fantastic voyagers, is "nothing but monsters with insatiable appetites". Sure enough, he is soon gobbled up by a bat.
This all makes for a ripping yarn somewhat at odds with the seriousness of the message. The laborious research into nanotechnology and the dangers therein is merely grafted on to what is essentially a retread of Crichton's The Lost World. There is no attempt at Swiftian satire – the only Swift mentioned in the four-page bibliography is Sabina F., co-author of Mite (Acari) Communities Associated with Ohi'a – Crichton wasn't interested in human nature. This is why his characters are mere puppets.
Not that this matters: no one ever read a Michael Crichton novel for the prose style either. As Martin Amis once said: "Out there, beyond the foliage, you see herds of clichés, roaming free." Richard Preston has done a fine job of maintaining the low standard. You can't see the join.
The inevitable movie version, surely the main reason for this posthumous publication, will no doubt be a blockbuster. In the meantime the scene where Hutter, stung, is paralysed by a queen wasp and must be rescued from its nest is well worth the price of admission. For once the reader is filled with genuine fear.